Long synonymous with carbo-phobia and anti-gluten mania, greater Los Angeles has become an unlikely bakery and bread haven.

By Rebecca Flint Marx

March 7, 2018

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Fruit-Nut bread at Friends & Family, one of several bakeries helping the Los Angeles area emerge as a bread haven.CreditBeth Coller for The New York Times

The Los Angeles area, for all of its culinary diversity, has not historically been thought of as a haven for bread lovers. While it’s true that Nancy Silverton’s pioneering La Brea Bakery has produced artisan loaves since 1989, the area, rightly or wrongly, has a deeply entrenched reputation as a place where gluten fears to tread.

“I can remember a time when L.A. was the heart of darkness, the no-carb central,” said Zack Hall, the owner of Clark Street Bread. “But we’re also a city that has great pride in food and restaurants and really cares about high-quality ingredients.”

Clark Street, which Mr. Hall founded in 2014 and operates out of a stall in downtown’s Grand Central Market, is one of several bakeries that have helped greater Los Angeles emerge over the past few years as an unlikely bread paradise. In kitchens from Venice to Pasadena, bakers are milling their own flour, experimenting with wild yeasts, fermentation, and ancient grains, and turning out loaves that rival those in New York or San Francisco. And outsiders have taken note: this summer, San Francisco’s vaunted Tartine Manufactory will open an Arts District outpost.

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Superba Food + Bread is an industrial chic bakery-restaurant that opened in 2014.CreditBeth Coller for The New York Times

“There’s definitely a generation of people who went through really good training and then trained each other,” said Roxana Jullapat. She and her husband, Daniel Mattern, are the baker and chef, respectively, behind Friends & Family, an airy Thai Town spot that opened in 2016. Ms. Jullapat’s sprouted-wheat sandwich bread is one of the menu’s highlights; another is her rye chocolate cookie. The availability of different grains, a relatively new development in the growing heirloom grain movement,“has totally changed the game” for Los Angeles bakers, Ms. Jullapat said.

Last spring and fall, over the course of two crawls through the new crop of bakeries in the Los Angeles area, I encountered loaves as distinct as the bakers that produce them. In Venice, I found Anton Steiner’s excellent sourdough toast and Nutella croissants at Superba Food + Bread, an industrial chic bakery-restaurant that opened in 2014. About a mile away, I inhaled hemp-nori whole wheat bread at Gjusta, the sprawling four-year-old bakery-deli-cafe co-owned by the local chef Travis Lett, and then walked three blocks to Rose Cafe, a Venice institution that was revamped in 2015 with a menu by Jason Neroni (formerly of Superba); the lavender-hued polenta loaf was a high point of my trip.

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Rose Cafe is a Venice institution that was revamped in 2015.CreditBeth Coller for The New York Times

Heading east, I stopped at Culver City’s Lodge Bread, a three-year-old establishment whose owners, Alexander Phaneuf and Or Amsalam, leaven their whole grain breads with a slowly fermenting sourdough starter (as opposed to commercial active yeast). Four smallish slices of their muscular seeded rye, served with gravlax and whitefish salad, kept me full for hours.

The gospel of whole grains and long fermentation (which, among other things, breaks down gluten) has been effective in converting many gluten-phobic customers, said Andy Kadin, the baker behind Bub & Grandma’s: “Without jumping down their throat, we say, ‘maybe it’s not a problem — maybe it’s white flour or bread from the supermarket, which isn’t bread at all.’”

Mr. Kadin, a former advertising copywriter and creative director, began baking bread out of his home in 2014; most of his impeccable loaves are naturally leavened, and his whole-grain flours come from Grist & Toll, a Pasadena flour mill. Mr. Kadin moved into a wholesale bakery in Silver Lake in February; you can find his breads at the Hollywood Farmers Market and restaurants throughout town.

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Whole wheat sourdough with labneh, pickled radish, cucumber, capers, and lox at Gjusta.CreditBeth Coller for The New York Times

For a time, Mr. Kadin baked out of Mr. Hall’s Clark Street Bread space. Like Mr. Kadin, Mr. Hall — a former musician — uses natural leavening and locally sourced and milled grains; his country loaf is the stuff that failed Paleo diets are made of. And like Mr. Kadin, Mr. Hall is expanding: this spring, he’ll open an Echo Park bakery and cafe.

In Pasadena, you can see how grains are milled at Grist & Toll, which in 2013 became the first urban flour mill to open in greater Los Angeles in a century. At its retail shop, the owner Nan Kohler spends much of her time explaining to customers the importance of regional grains and fresh flour; education, she said, is necessary “to disrupt a huge commercial industry.”

If you’re in Pasadena, stop by Seed Bakery, where Joseph Abrakjian mills his own flour and ferments his dough for as long as 24 hours. As I enjoyed Seed’s grilled eggplant sandwich on rustic country bread, I thought of what Ran Zimon, the owner of the six-year-old Arts District bakery Bread Lounge, had told me. “When I opened, I was worried,” he said. “There was always some kind of diet running around and I thought maybe people just don’t want to eat bread in L.A. But I realized they do. People like to eat what tastes good.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page TR4 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘No-Carb Central’? Go Ahead, Grab a Loaf. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe